A good product person is worth their weight in gold but holy hell there are a lot of charlatans out there. These days I prefer to work at companies without PMs, as an engineer the odds simply don't work in your favor.
They:
- Prioritize building the wrong thing
- Don't prioritize customer interviews and think they know what is best for users, which can be a double whammy when you consider social skills are not always a strength of very technical people
- Don't understand the role marketing or sales plays in the success of the product because of their limited understanding of those roles and preconceived notions that prevent them from collaborating effectively
I've also met plenty of supposed technical people who fail to ship code or grasp some of the technical concepts for the work they are supporting.
But the majority of the time it feels like we just stuck a middleman in between engineering and the real subject matter experts.
I know for a fact that Google doesn’t actually have “Product Owner” as a role in their org chart.
At Google, the separation is:
Product Manager (Vision), which is focused on gathering business needs and driving the Feature Roadmap.
Program Manager (Execution), which focuses on finding ways to unblock delivery of the vision with cross-functional teams, such as getting designs, legal approvals, etc.
I recently experienced a Product Owner for the first time when hiring one at Sivo (YC W21).
It seems like Product Owners exist to accelerate the Roadmap vision into Epics and Stories in solutions like JIRA so product visions are more actionable by engineering.
Similarly, while not a role at Google, I have heard that some MegaCorps will have “project managers” that often report up into Program Managers. This is similar to the product owner and product manager relationship.
Hope that helps!
In theory, that is the EM’s job.
Those three things are an enormous amount of work, each one. If anyone tries to do more than one they will suck. There are exceptions... some people are able to pull it off. Those people should go start a company and not be PMs.
At least in my experience, good engineering managers had a lot of input into the product function because they were paying attention to the customers and had insight into what could be built - part of the reason they are a manager is they have more than eng skills. The PM and EM need a good relationship and usually do, at least at Google. The program manager has less input to what to build.
Outside of Google the product management function does indeed seem to be... pretty awful for everyone involved. Bad PMs annoy everyone and give the function a bad rep, good PMs come in and are treated poorly (due to bad function rep) or have silly expectations put on them due to a lack of understanding of the function, and leave.
If the best product managers are at google, then that's very damning, given that Google are notorious for having awful product sense. I'm not convinced that's true though. I've worked with good product people at small companies.
That said - I don't think Google PMs are notorious for having awful product sense. They do seem to get hired at a lot of places. And product sense is a wishy washy term. If someone tells you they have great product sense ask them why they don't have a billion dollars.
Regarding why product people don’t have $1m. I would suggest that building a great product is not sufficient for that, you also need to be able to sell it.
I might be putting toooo much responsibility on product, but realistically to have a good product in a good market, it has to be sellable - ie built with the distribution in mind so that an economical go-to-market is within the control of the company. For large enterprise customers the product might built with direct sales in mind - high price, high value, features large enterprise need, sufficiently defined buyer group etc. If one doesn't factor that into what product to build for what market, I don't think they have product sense.
Most super early startups I've seen w/ serious problems can be traced back to the founder doing all three and sucking at each.
Only thing I'd say is that it's not just PM/EM that do scoping and input on product but the whole eng team. The healthiest teams I've been in used that setup and it worked really well.
I'm struck by how close your definition of Product Manager is to the idea of Product Owner: a person who understands the interests of the users and the business and prioritises work in order of bang for buck. Someone who is really good with the 80/20 rule.
It also explains to me why no-one can explain the transition from PO to PM: the people who think there is any difference did not really understand the PO role.
Dividing work up, organising an issue tracker etc. are tangential activities that POs frequently perform, but they can also be performed by anyone else on the team.
I'd argue that when you reduce the "owner" to the person whose only job is these tangential things, you actually hurt the team by taking initiative away from engineers. Engineers should be capable of organising their own work as a team, and should be considered junior if they can't.
I first encountered the ideas of programme manager and project manager in the pre-agile world (from orgs that liked PRINCE/2). It makes sense to me that the programme manager role exists now in a larger team of teams of teams environment. The agile manifesto was about small teams and didn't really have anything to say about larger projects.
A hat tip to scrum masters who seem to have been sidelined in the product management world, because their (no-less important, when done well) role was to unblock in exactly the way that you describe a programme manager doing (plus understanding people and improving collaboration). The main difference I can see here is that a scrum master was usually responsible for one team only, which was probably too little authority to compete with the ambition of product people and the disinterest of business executives. Hence no surprise that the role has disappeared.
The "project manager" role isn't something I've encountered recently, but seems like what it always was (what you get when developers aren't/cannot be trusted to take initiative). It sounds like a more honest title than watered-down "product owner": these orgs never understood agile or product and just gave their project managers a new title.
What is true is there will be fewer VPs than people they manage, fewer PMs than engineers, and fewer CEOs than almost everything else. ;-) </pedantic>
Given that principle though, what do you think I meant by "When I look at the ratio between engineers and product managers, it seems they are skeptical about the role."? Do you really think I meant that since there are fewer product managers than engineers, I've concluded they're skeptical about the role?
Google tends toward about a dozen engineers per PM overall. It varies across the org depending on the product. Google is explicitly pro PM. The CEO was one. There is no information in the ratio.
Problems seem to begin when product management is externalized from the product teams, put into dedicated teams or departments. The role is seen as something like "telling the devs what to build and making sure they build it."